The SEO profession is growing a fast rate due to many realizing the huge potential of search marketing to generate leads and sales. In fact, SEO is getting so popular that many savvy individuals are taking on an SEO practice of their own.

If you're one of these individuals who is interested in learning and educating yourself about the best practices of SEO, below we share five SEO books that are definitely worth reading. Whether for ecommerce SEO or local SEO, these books will help you master your craft as a search marketer.

The Art of SEO

The Art of SEO will help you develop a comprehensive SEO strategy to get traffic from search engines, and some of the top SEO experts in this field will guide you in a step-by-step fashion. The second edition is full of the most recent changes in the SEO landscape, and you will learn a lot of amazing tactics from basic to really advanced. The complexities and intricacies of SEO will be explained in detail here, along with the theory and underlying workings of search engines. This information can be a gold mine for you if you know how to use it.

SEO for Content Writers and PR Pros

SEO for Content Writers and PR Pros will teach you how to write content to attract a lot of traffic from search engines - which is a very important aspect of the SEO process. You will understand the reasons why high quality content is very important to attract huge amounts of traffic to your virtual property, and how to take advantage of the recent changes in the algorithms of search engines to make sure you get the most out of your SEO plan.

The Link Building Book

The Link Building Book will teach you how to generate links from people who do not know you. You will learn about budget, and how to write incredible content that will make people want to include your link in their virtual properties. You will understand that SEO is not a numbers game, but a set of techniques that must be carefully planned to get the most out of search engines. You will understand how to build your links, and why quality is paramount for your success.

Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing

This a great SEO book will teach you how to create content that engages, inspires and attracts readers. You will learn how to socialize and optimize this content to get the results you are looking for. So whether you looking to attract the recruiting attention of a solid local Peoria SEO company or want to optimize your own website, this book is a great investment.

SEO Fitness Workbook

SEO Fitness Workbook will teach you how to get the most out of search engines by using 7 simple but powerful steps to get the results you want. You will learn how to set expectation, how to get great keywords, how to structure your website, how to generate content, and so on. This a great option for those interested in SEO for ecommerce stores and e-retailers.

We have talked about some of the top SEO books available, and you now have a clear understanding of what you will learn from each one of them. These SEO books have been a success because they have a high quality content that will get you results - which is something you need to bear in mind.

The entry of social networking sites has greatly impacted the way lawyers and law firms tailor their marketing strategies. Almost everyone has an account on Facebook and Twitter, two of the world’s top hubs where people converge, communicate, and socialize through online mediums. And in terms of business and professional life, almost every individual is connected via LinkedIn.

Many online marketing specialists leverage the potential of LinkedIn to inbound high quality traffic and legal cases, and in many different ways. Whether via search, referrals, or content marketing, LinkedIn offers a high level of potential to inbound quality traffic for lawyers and law firms.

Below we highlight 5 essential tips in which lawyers and law firms alike should consider to maximize their marketing potential via LinkedIn.

1. Profile Completeness

Many underestimate the power of a complete, duly filled out profile. Whether is an individual profile or a business profile, people, particularly professionals, will read throughout your wall and see whether you are significant or not to their purpose. Having the necessary information placed in your profile allow LinkedIn users to get a clearer picture of you and your business and help them decide whether you can or not provide them with solutions or not.

2. Grow "First Degree" Connections

Lilach Bullock, a social networking pioneer currently writing for the Social Media Traffic Generation, says that first degree connections can help you build a good reputation online. They are the ones who help you get your name out there, mainly because they can read your profile and see your status, which bring us to number…

3. Update Your Status Regularly

Whether you are having a sale, launch a new product, or release information, make sure that you announce it on your LinkedIn profile page. Also include in your status your CTAs (call to action) as this can really help drive traffic from LinkedIn to your site.

4. Create/Join a Business and Legal Groups

Gather your peers and even your competitors and form a group. Having your own legal community will allow you to interact with other legal professionals, learn trends and trade secrets, and ultimately generate traffic from and for each other. The trick here is maintaining the group and keeping it going despite time constraints.

5. Include Portfolios & Quality Content in Your Profile

LinkedIn is a network created by and for professionals. Therefore, people who look into your profile would like to see what you can provide. Having a sample of your expertise or portfolio of your previous works, products, and services will provide people a preview of what you can offer them.

The Google Keyword Tool has been a very helpful application for many webmasters, search marketers, and online business owners over the years. Once an ideal tool for SEO and PPC keyword research, the Google Keyword Tool would show search volume statistics of a certain keyword, as well as specific variations regarding cetain keyword match types.

Although this application from Google has provided valuable data which has translated into to highly successful search marketing strategies, Google has decided to retire the Keyword Tool for something different.

Enter the Google Keyword Planner Tool

The replacement of Google's Keyword Tool (the Google Keyword Planner Tool) provides a slightly different set of information compared to the old Keyword Tool, even if the settings (place, time, etc.) are essentially the same. According to Google, the new Keyword Planner Tool provides “historical statistics only for exact match”.

So what does all of this mean?

On the positive side of things, this means the data from the new Keyword Planner Tool is rather simplified, making it easier for the user to get a grasp of the information provided by the results. Also, data shown by the new Keyword Planner are significantly more applicable than information provided by the old Keyword Tool. Google execs explain that the information delivered by the new application now include those that come from other mobile platforms and devices apart from desktops and laptops, specifically smart phones and tablets.

On the negative side of things, the data can seem a bit inflated when orchestrating a very specific search marketing strategy. Without the capabilities of knowning precise keyword data for different match types (exact, phrase, and broad match,) search marketers are challenged to minutely determine the ideal keyword targets for their strategy.

Additional Changes to Keep Top of Mind

The following changes are also applied to the new Keyword Planner Tool:

A number of search marketers are still struggling on how to work the new Keyword Planner Tool. Understandably, a lot are experiencing some issues on the data provided by the new tool. However, Google is still on the works on how to entice people to use the new keyword application and actually deliver what the tool promises.

Local monthly searches and global monthly searches are now simplified and merged into the "Average monthly searches" column. The results are derived specifically, depending on the parameters set by the users

Ad Share is no longer included. Google is still working on how to provide information on ad impressions

Search share column no longer exists

Most information can now be accessed by downloading the historical statistics from the Keyword Planner, such as local search trends and webpage extractions data

A number of search marketers are still struggling on how to work the new Keyword Planner Tool. Understandably, a lot are experiencing some issues on the data provided by the new tool. However, Google is still on the works on how to entice people to use the new keyword application and actually deliver what the tool promises.

The internet has greatly changed the way we do things. People use the internet to look for information about services they want. Fewer people rely on traditional advertising methods such as newspaper ads or the phone book.

With the increasing number of people using the internet to look for legal services, web legal marketing is an important aspect every practice should embrace. Law firm web marketing will allow you as a lawyer to promote your services using the available web resources. Below are the three top law firm web marketing strategies to embrace for 2014 to not only place you at a better place for clients to find you but to stay ahead of competition

Content marketing is at the heart of every web marketing campaign. Valuable content is what will sell you to potential clients. Your goal should be to create great content that users will want to read and share. Don’t just create content for the sake of it. The content should be useful to the reader and should convince him/ her to take action- follow on social media, register for the newsletter etc. Some of the top content marketing strategies include blogging, creating a company video, and articles.

Blogging - Create valuable blog posts with the right keywords wisely spread throughout the posts. Provide valuable tips, advice, and information that will make readers want to visit your main legal site for more.

Videos - Creating videos surrounding your law firm web marketing strategy is one of the best ways to get prospects to use your services. Make sure the video is short and precise explaining the services you offer, pricing, offers etc.

Articles- Like blogging creating high quality articles is important for your practice. Use the right keywords and provide value to users.

A good example of a brand that's doing this well is LawMarketing.com. The offer a wealth of information and resources to their audience, which naturally gains attention and new website visitors.

2. Be active on social media (particularly Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.)

A lot of people spend a considerable amount of their time on social networking sites, interacting with not only their friends and families but with brands as well. Using social media as a web marketing strategy serves to get your content and practice gets as much attention as possible and to get visits from social networks that will eventually convert into clients.

Creating a profile that represents your practice is important, being active on social media is as equally important. Potential clients need to know that you will be there when they need you and what a better way to show it than being active on twitter, facebook and other social media accounts

3. Exploit search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) to generate traffic and new cases to the firm's website.

With the recent changes in Google and other top search engines, an effective SEO is important. SEO helps in two ways; first to increase your ranking on search engines and to help clients find you on the internet. Search engine marketing involves two major components; Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising. SEO involves strategies such as writing valuable content, copywriting, link building among others.

Pay Per Click involves using Ads to promote your practice with the aim of converting new prospects onto your list. With PPC you can target a specific group of people who are searching for legal services. Use Google ad words, Facebook ads to market your practice online. For SEO create highly optimized websites, provide fresh content, and avoid link spamming- forcing links where they shouldn’t be in link building. In addition choose trusted sources for PPC advertising such as facebook ads and Google adwords.

Law firm web marketing is important for your practice. It will not only help your firm rank higher on search engines but will ensure clients find you.

And looking at how many people use emails and have integrated email services into their daily lives, even the slightest fraction of its population can become a business owner’s huge market. Email marketing tactics have been devised and modified countless times because of the email’s potential to tap to a very large market. And with content marketing, the email platform has proven to be a potent partner.

Content marketing and email marketing complement each other in many ways. Both aim to generate credibility, leads, and conversions. Content marketing produces the right content to engage the right people, while email marketing reaches out to the desired market and target specific demographics and further drive the engagement between content and people who are interested in it.

Developing a Cohesive Strategy

Looking at the bigger picture of digital marketing, content is designed to reach out and get the people interested and hooked. On the other hand, email marketing ensures that your content reaches the right people and gets them involved in further spreading your content and encouraging them to take the actions you deem desirable. Email marketing helps you drive high quality traffic to your landing pages.

The trick in this partnership lies on how good the email contacts are. Regardless of how good your content is, if your email strategy fails to make people react positively to what you are promoting, then brace yourself for failure.

But if you employ the following tips, then you will see how content marketing and email marketing gel together and so well that your ROI figures will shoot right off the charts.

Create specific content for specific audiences. Marketing specialists always drive this point – never be too general when you are targeting certain demographics.

Make your content sociable. Whenever you post something in the Internet, make sure you fully utilize social sharing buttons. Having your content easily shareable will do wonders for your post, your site, and ultimately your business.

Send out relevant emails and make sure you send a lot. When people get the hang of your content and like it, make sure you send them more. Relevance should be shared between your content and your email. Regularly sending emails to your contacts allows is also a great practice, especially if you offer usable and significant content.

Many online business professionals have preached how the email marketing approach can be a perfect partner in any business scheme as far as online marketing is concerned. Almost all people have at least an email account which they maintain regularly and use to communicate with their peers and business colleagues. Formal, informal, business, and personal messages are now transmitted and received via email services.

Google+ is something any Peoria business interested in local SEO should not take lightly. Google+, if applied appropriately to a local SEO campaign, can turn rankings around for some businesses.

To start your business on the righteous path for local SEO in Peoria, IL, below are some of the benefits that Google+ offers small to medium sized businesses.

Get the Most Authoritative Citation for Peoria SEO

Probably the most important factor in using Google+ for local SEO in Peoria, IL is getting your business listed (which in turn provides a citation for your business.) Citations are simply mentions of your business' name, address, and phone number. And the more citations you have sprinkled throughout the web (commonly on local directories), the better overall authority and local SEO potential your company will have in Google search.

Social Perks That Only Google+ Provides

Posting on Google+ allows you to enjoy a string of advantages that only comes with Google. These benefits include having your content automatically indexed by Google’s search engine crawlers. Also, being on Google+ pushes the search engine to search the web of all your presences and have it integrated and weighted together with SEO.

Using Google+ also allows you to enjoy the perks of YouTube, Google Circles, and Hangouts to name a few. Here you can communicate and engage with your audience and fellow peers. In short, an active social media presence on Google+ can offer incredible potential beyond simply local SEO in Peoria, IL.

Real Time Meetings via Google Hangouts

Real time video streaming? That is one of the things many businesses enjoy with Google+. You can hold conferences, business meetings, and demonstrations with your clients regardless of location and time zones. Hangouts lets you brainstorm with your crew, pitch an idea to your boss, or just chat and discuss business issues with colleagues.

The best thing about Hangouts? All videos are automatically recorded and posted on YouTube, which enables you to access it anytime, anywhere, at your convenience.

Show Your Business from the Inside with Google Business Photos

With business photos, you can take your customers and potential clients on a 360-degrees virtual tour inside your establishment. This enables them to get a “feel” or an “atmosphere” of your business location and see what is in store for them if they decide to pay a visit.

Give Searchers Clear Direction with Google Maps

With the Google Map feature, Peoria business owners can easily show their customers what the outside of your place looks like. This offers people an idea of what to look for when trying to find your business. So although this is not a local SEO tip, it's one that can help turn prospects into paying customers.

These are just some of the small business local SEO tips and advantages of having your business listed on Google+. Do not put this new social media platform from Google at the backburner. Explore its potential and you definitely usher your business to success.

There is a dramatic as well as drastic increase of mobile internet users in the last couple of years. This means more and more people are now accessing the internet via their smart phones and tablets. For those doing business online, mobile website optimization (or ensuring a company has mobile-friendly website) is critical to reach consumers and effectively promote products or services.

Why Mobile Website Optimization is Essential?

Many Internet institutions, Google included, have said that by 2015, almost every single individual in the planet will own a mobile device, particularly the smart phone. That equates to nearly 6 billion users, a very enticing and large market of online shoppers and consumers. This is also means having a desktop-anchored website is no longer enough for small businesses to large scale companies.

If you run a company in this day and age, having a mobile-friendly website is a necessity. But with the huge potential presented by the mobile internet users, establishing a strong and reliable mobile web presence is now an imperative.

This is because traditional websites are configured for mobile platforms and this leads to bad user experience. In a recent study, 57% of the world’s Internet users say they would not recommend a site that has a bad mobile web presence while another 40% say they will seek another service after a bad mobile internet experience.

What Defines a Mobile-friendly Website?

There is now a trend that companies are pursuing for mobile website optimization. These are basically websites specifically designed to provide excellent user experience for the mobile internet users.

Since screens are smaller in phones and tablets, the structure, design, and schematics of mobile websites differ greatly from traditional websites. Less text, more buttons, larger fonts, and features like maps and click-to-call graphics are the major attributes of a mobile website design. Website optimization ompanies like the Web Presence Group are making a push toward mobile website optimization and user-intuitive web design.

There are several elements that make a company's mobile website design successful. These are ease of access and navigation, fast loading speed time, redirects that lead to the mobile version of the page, and readable content.

But more than just the actual look and feel of the mobile website, your company’s mobile web presence also hinges on SEO. Thus, building a mobile web presence require successfully implementing SEO and web design elements as well as offline and offsite components.

As the rapid increase of mobile internet users continues, it becomes more important for businesses to form a strong mobile web presence. Because this new breed of internet users are able to access the Internet anytime and anywhere, it is crucial that your company integrates mobile website optimization into its strategy.

When people talk about SEO, most think of keyword research, content optimization, and building links. While these aspects are indeed important for SEO, many people often neglect the technical side of the SEO equation.

Technical SEO is a huge aspect of the equation, entailing complex and code-heavy processes that are invisible to users. While technical SEO focuses on the site’s HTML structure and mark-up, these components can impact a site’s performance in more ways the one.

In a nut shell, technical SEO focuses on a site’s internal construct and addresses its fluidity of search engine crawling and indexing. A site that has employed excellent technical SEO techniques is more easily indexed by search engines and are easily located by users, which adds to its user-friendliness and positive user experience.

The following are technical SEO tips that you might want to consider when optimizing your site.

Fix HTML Errors

Locate and repair HTML errors and other issues. HTML errors can be nuisance especially to both site owners and users. Common HTML issues such as crawl errors, like DNS lookup errors and 404 pages can hamper user experience and impede the performance of your site. These errors can lead to loss of users, mainly because they will quickly look for other alternatives and sources.

Optimize & Integrate Sitemaps

Sitemaps are basically your site’s visible index to all your site’s pages. There are two types of sitemaps: HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps are basically food to search engine crawlers and spiders. If your product, service, or content is not indexed in your HTML sitemap, search engine crawlers will have trouble locating your content and have it indexed in its database.

XML sitemaps are specifically designed for Google Webmaster Tools. But essentially they function like HTML sitemaps - they help search engines to find your site’s content and have it indexed.

Ensure All Content is Unique (Espeically Meta Data)

Make sure your meta data is unique. Duplicate meta tags (page titles and meta descriptions) can spell bad things for your site and its performance if you can’t locate them and fix them quickly. Meta tags that contain similar words and descriptions will confuse crawlers and may lead to mis-indexing of pages.

Use Canonical Tags Where Appropriate

There are certain sites, particularly large e-commerce sites, have multiple sites that contain same content. Canonical tags help search engine spiders to find the most meaningful site or URL. This will make sure that spiders index the right page over other pages with similar content.

Similar to canonical tags, another very important technical SEO integration you'll want to use when marking-up your site's content is Schema.org. Here you can better define what exactly your content is for search engines. Schema.org lays everything out on the table, and it's a great resource to learn and implement new tags as you go.

Keyword Optimize URLs

When your URLs, basically the words bunched together in the webpage’s address bar, are not optimize, the chances of the search engine spider finding it is close to minimal. It is just wrong when your URL says something about real estate when your content tackles on dental technicians.

Whether for enterprise-level SEO or local SEO, technical SEO can have a profound impact on rankings. There is a variety of technical SEO tips out there that are not mentioned in this article. Do your research and experiment with various ideas. There's always new and emerging strategies being brought up in forums and discussion sites.

There are various content management systems (widely known as CMS platforms) available for free to each and every one of us. However, not all CMS are designed specifically for SEO while other content systems are a tad difficult to be optimized for excellent search engine rankings.

Whether for a local site or ecommerce, there are those CMS platforms that are not only easy to use (even for the newbie webmaster), but are engineered for SEO, namely: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and Exponent CMS. The following are some of the reasons why these CMS are the most SEO-friendly options to choose.

WordPress

This CMS platform has been the go-to choice for many web developers, individual bloggers, and giant corporations. And for good reasons at that. For one, setting up a WordPress website is quite a breeze compared to its famed and unknown counterparts. Two, it is backed by a large support community that can provide instant solutions to both simple and complex issues and problems. SEO wise, most plug-ins also known as extensions) designed for SEO are created for the WordPress system, most notably the All-In-One SEO plugin.

WordPress is also flexible, making modifications to a WordPress website easy to incorporate. This is a big plus in terms of SEO. One can easily install codes, rearrange placement of content, graphics, banners, and videos and optimize them for search engine spiders and crawlers.

Exponent CMS

While Exponent CMS does not have the following of major CMS players such as aWordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, it has one SEO-friendly feature most CMS do not have in their arsenal. Unlike WordPress, wherein SEO tools are mostly plugins, the SEO functions of Exponent CMS are built-in and integrated to its systems, making it very easy for users to tweak and introduce any SEO-related modifications to the site.

Exponent is quite popular for ecommerce sites. Ecommerce store owners can manage their inventory and customer data with ease, in addition to executing ecommerce SEO capabilities on the fly.

Joomla

Joomla is also a popular CMS alternative that can hold its own against other CMS platform such as WordPress and Drupal. In terms of SEO friendliness, Joomla has a list of elements that make it wired for SEO. First, it already has SEO settings integrated in its system. Users can easily change the Meta tags of the website or articles, and re-write the URL. Meta tags are important in SEO. These are codes search engine crawlers and bots look for when they scan and scour websites.

Joomla also offers suppot for their SEO strategies but somewhat limited compared to the support offered by WordPress.

Drupal

Perhaps WordPress immediate competitor, Drupal’s platforms provide users functional SEO applications and features. Among the SEO benefits presented by the Drupal system are search engine optimized URLs. One can easily optimize the components of their sites URLs for both users and search engines, such as dates, time, keyword, and titles relevant to the node. However, Drupal lacks the top level functionality offered by the WordPress platform.

Local SEO uses a different techniques compared to traditional forms of SEO. Most local SEO strategies in 2013 focused on making sure a business or firm appeared on the top local directories such as Yelp, Yahoo and Google+. Although it is important to get listed on the local directories, more effort is needed to ensure your firm is able to contend in competive local marketplace of legal services.

Change your perception of local SEO and ensure your law firm gets solid results. Check out these three angles in which view your 2014 local SEO strategy.

Be Active in Social Media

Most law firms understand how important it is for them to have online presence on social media, however not all firms take advantage of the available audience. Some think so long as they have a presence on social media, and placed a link back to their site, their local SEO efforts have been accomplished.

You need to do more to direct traffic to your site. You need to engage your audience on social media to make it count. So how can this be done?

Attract larger audiences by coming up with promotions on social media like Google offers.

Get bigger audiences by engaging them more.- Get images optimized then go ahead and upload them on social sites.- Connect with respectable professionals who stand out in their area of expertise.

Business pages on social media can also provide great authority for local SEO with some of the Yelp pages having a page ranking of 5.- Social credibility is important for people who are looking to get good search engine rankings.

There is a correlation between the number of Facebook or Twitter followers with the search engine rankings. So do not neglect social media in your local SEO plan for 2014.

Links are Better than Citations

Search engine rankings are normally affected by the number and quality of external links that point to certain websites. You should start building and earning links to your website once it has been well established on the local business directories.

This allows you to get in touch with other professionals allowing them to make guest blog posts on your website. You need to cultivate such relationships since they will help you in future marketing. The new members also get listed in the local chamber website, so invest in this membership if it makes sense for your budget and marketing efforts.

You need to provide great content to gain good audiences. When people realize that you actually give them valuable information, you are likely to get more links back to your website. You need to brand yourself as far as a certain niche is concerned. Make sure that people get the sense that you know your stuff. Use articles and videos to pass information. These are the different ways you can use to pass on content for SEO Peoria IL.

Create Valuable Content

By now you should be aware of the phrase "content is king". This has been true over the years but this is gradually changing. The focus has shifted from providing content that is full of keywords to providing content that is relevant to a particular audience. In short, you need to know the needs of your target audience then provide them with content they can identify with.

Assess your target audience and find out from them about the problems and issues they are facing.- Ask yourself how you can go about helping them based on the resources available to you.- Which mode of communication would be most effective for your audience?- Look at the different businesses and find out which ones are likely to thrive on social media and Google searches. You will notice that the most successful businesses are the ones which have great blogs, videos, podcasts and graphics being used to carry out marketing

Refresh Your Local SEO Strategy in 2014

Assess your organization's marketing plan so as to decide how much time or money you are willing to allocate to it. Come up with fresh ideas that shift focus to creating online marketing strategies for content. You should also do your best to ensure that you establish social media presence that is legitimate. As hard as some of these concepts may seem, at the end of the day, they are likely to have a positive influence on the local SEO especially in 2014.